Bagels are torus-shaped bread products made of relatively dense dough and a smooth, tough, plastic-like outer skin and are frequently topped with poppy or sesame seeds. Bagels are in high demand and special outlets have been established which sell bagels as their primary product.
Bagels may be divided in two by a complete or partial horizontal cut, for toasting or in order to insert therein some other foodstuff such as cheese, vegetables, butter, fish, etc. Because of the tough, plastic-like character of their outer skin injury can easily occur when cutting is done by hand with an unguided knife. Consequently various bagel slicing devices which are much safer have been developed. Most such devices are hand-powered, but electrically powered slicers are also known.
Many U.S. patents describe bagel cutting devices intended primarily for home use, among them U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,249,445; 5,732,610; 5,881,621; 5,903,982 and 5,927,701. An automatic machine for cutting bagels in half is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,776,252. The devices described in these patents are not slicing machines, however, in the sense that they only cut the bagel into two, or partially cut the bagel to produce a butterfly cut.
Bakeries producing bagels cannot know exactly how many bagels will be required for sale during the course of any given day, and are often faced with a substantial surplus at the end of the working day. Such bagels, even if frozen or refrigerated, cannot be sold as fresh product on the following morning. A solution to this problem is to slice the left-over bagels into multiple thin slices, typically 4 mm thick. The slices are then baked and packaged and sold as a separate product, referred to as “bagel chips.” Further, the current trend of preference for low carbohydrate diets also makes the production of bagel chips desirable for bakers of bagels; a 4 mm thick bagel chip has about one tenth the carbohydrates of a 40 mm thick bagel and is therefore more likely to be bought and eaten by persons seeking to limit their consumption of carbohydrates. The relatively high prices customers are willing to pay for bagel chips should make them a significant profit center for the typical bagel bakery. Clearly, it is economically advantageous that the production of bagel slices for bagel chips be done by a machine which, once loaded with product, operates automatically without the need of a human operator.
The machines commonly seen in delicatessens for slicing cheese and meat have been used by bakeries to slice bagels for the preparation of bagel chips. Such machines have a disc-shaped rotary cutting blade and a reciprocating platform for supporting the food items to be sliced. An operator is needed to hold and advance the food into the blade. Production is slow and labor intensive and there is the ever-present danger of operator injury.
Bagel chips without a central hole have been produced by preparing rod-shaped pieces of bagel-type dough which are baked and then sliced by a food processor. A vertical feed tube guides the rod-shaped bread product into a rotating disk equipped with a slicer of the type commonly used for making potato chips. Aside from requiring an operator and failing to provide a solution for utilizing left-over bagels, this method does not provide consumers with the expected, characteristic washer-like bagel shape; the slices produced by this method are disk-shaped, with no hole in the center, and of diameter much smaller than that of a typical bagel.
A machine which produces multiple cuts of bagels has been marketed by ProBake, Inc., 2057 East Aurora Road, Twinsburg, Ohio, U.S.A. This machine has multiple reciprocating blades which preclude changing the thickness of the slices, and the bagels are fed through the machine by a gravity chute. The claimed output is 60 bagels per minute, the equivalent of about 600 slices per minute, and the machine is quite costly.
J. E. Grote Company, Inc. of Blacklick, Ohio markets slicers employing a band blade which it claims are capable of slicing bagels for bagel chips. While being good for slicing long “logs” of food such as cheese and meat, these machines have been criticized for being unable to properly slice the ends of relatively small stacked items such as apples and bagels and are therefore wasteful of product. In any case even the smallest machine of Grote takes considerable floor space and is quite expensive and is therefore hardly suitable for the typical bagel bakery.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,523,505 describes a feed chute apparatus adapted for mounting on a delicatessen-type rotary slicing machine but fails to meet the needs of efficiency and convenience for the typical bagel bakery because it requires an attendant to move the feed chute back and forth and because it cannot accommodate a convenient bin for collecting the bagel slices produced.
A carousel type bagel slicing machine is described by U.S. Pat. No. 6,619,170 B2. With it, a stack of bagels is contained in a vertical feed tube mounted on a vertically mounted rotating carrousel which passes over a rotating disk-shaped knife rising through a hole in a table top to a distance substantially equal to the thickness of the bagel slice desired. In operation the bottom bagel in the feed tube slides over the table surface until cut by the rotating knife and the bagel chip thus produced drops through the hole under the knife into a collection bin below. The chief drawback of this machine is that its revolving knife and revolving carrousel frequently jams and stalls, apparently as a result of downward pressure on the knife's upper surface exerted by the bagel being cut in much the same way that the pad of an automobile disk brake presses on the drum. When stalled, manual action is required to release the jammed knife and restart the operation of this slicer. As a result of its tendency to jam and stall, the carrousel type bagel slicing machine described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,619,170 B2 requires considerable supervision by an operator, thus defeating the aim of a machine to slice bagels automatically, with a human operator needed only to refill the hopper.